Zakrocki Olak

Marcin Olak – guitars
Patryk Zakrocki – viola, violin

Olak. Zakrocki. Wielecki.
Spontaneous Chamber Music

It?s all about improvisation. Open, with no limits.

We come from different backgrounds. We played on the jazz festivals and with symphony orchestras – actually we composed for them. We wrote and performed music for movies and theatres. We gave masterclasses on improvisation. We played ancient and contemporary music. We were leader and session musicians. And now we play together, searching for new sounds. We mix chamber music with? well, with everything. We improvise.

In January, 2016 our first album, Spontaneous Chamber Music, vol.1, was released by Słuchaj Foundation, media support is provided by Jazzarium.pl

Info / Bio

Patryk Zakrocki

Musician, improviser, composer, sound artist, and illustrator (born in 1974 in Warsaw). He currently plays violin, oscillators and electric mbira as a half of the duet SzaZa and together with the guitarist Marcin Olak, alters the melodies of old music boxes, and co-creates two unique projects of his own conception: Gabinet Ucha Wewnętrznego / The Inner Ear Massage Parlour and Kino Dźwięku / Sound Cinema.

He passionately conducts improvising orchestras and choirs, works with chamber and electroacoustic music, and pushes the possibilities of audio drama. Patryk Zakrocki released 12 albums, including two solo works. Aside from countless shows in Europe, he also performed in USA, Island, Uruguay, Israel, Egypt, China and Japan.

Sounds by EA: A hair dryer in a carton box, a beer bottle on a marble floor, clerks in a bank inputting withdrawal transactions, automatic doors leading to a shopping center garage, a central heating system, a doenner vendor, machines at a dry cleaner’s, putting on pajamas, sunflower seeds, a bathroom drawer for cosmetics, a gear box, rain in a forest, a wild cat under a table, water sounds at a swimming pool, moaning of an elevator, dragging a Christmas tree upstairs, a coffee automate at an MTV office, damaged fridge at midnight, jumping on a bed in a parents’ bedroom, a toilet flush in the changing room of a fitness center, ice tea sipping, talking to a grandmother sounding different on the phone, sweeping a floor while playing with a dog, searching for a torch in a basement, flags in the wind in an abandoned district, breaking wooden sticks, feeding pigeons in an old town, steps in a hospital corridor, a mini waterfall in a garden, rather unrecognizable playground soundscapes, scissors on paper 20 minutes after the start of the new year 2002, throwing books through a window, aluminum cans being squeezed, boiling tomato soup on a Friday, checking in at the Warsaw airport, plastic bags full of nails, old family Hi-8 cassettes, a heartbeat, a crowded square, an air conditioner, chalk on the blackboard, a microwave oven turning on, shoe polishing, touching anything, a plastic bag in the wind, underground, some insects caught in a glass bottle, swallowing, a glow lamp, a paper ball falling from a table, a sustained tone of a trolley passing by, a hard disk and a floppy disk, a dial tone, footsteps on a slippery wet floor, a mechanical clock, water dripping, hair, a pencil, a ventilator, grass, a resonating electrical hum coming from the flat above, a zipper, boiling oil, calmness, undressing, hammering, a cat licking its fur, a summer breeze at the sea, scraping a wineglass against a window, an infected nostril breathing, a fire stake, sand dunes, haikus being uttered, paper towels in the toilet, tram brakes in a tunnel, continuous folding and unfolding of a celluloid plate, an empty office, horses running in the distance, ants in a frenzy, stirring some liquid in a mug, biting one?s nails, birds nesting, cleaning the mirror in a bathroom, metal on metal, workers? shouts from behind a window, playing under the shower, making faces, touching jack plugs with wet fingers, coughing, lighting a cigarette, playing roulette, putting on a backpack, sorting a bunch of visit cards, air coming through a narrow gap under a door, licking a contact mike, burping, an analogue radio scale, giving birth, crickets, a traffic jam, barbed wire on wood, squeezing a plastic ketchup bottle, ice on the lake “singing” during heavy winter, a ship coming back to port, the Romanian language, a harmonica out of tune, a child in the cradle gurgling, some open space, Rubik?s cube, riding a bike, a vacuum cleaner, freezing water, tubular-shaped objects, dungeons, electromagnetic induction, tearing something apart, frying pork, a CD spinning in a CD player, spraying deodorant, fish in an aquarium, meat, a ball pen, scratching, a quarrel, old women in church in Legnica speaking about their health problems, matches, night.

Membrana (Mem) is Kamil Antosiewicz, a connection-maker and writer/editor who works for WWW, the first Polish Internet magazine, as its cyberculture editor. Antosiewicz released the 3-inch CD Obiekt 640 (with Facial Index on Polycephal) and then Tektonika (with Viön and Facial Index), which links sonic trophies from his Moroccan travels with droning elements. His recent interests include the decontextualization of sound material and experiments with primal structures of non-organic origin—white noise and sine waves—transforming them into sounds of an organic nature.

Patryk Zakrocki releases his work under the name of Meoma. His current interests are concentrated in acoustic music and composition. Believing a score to be equally as important as free expression, he experiments during live sessions and studio works with various techniques as a guitar and violin player. His recent works include performances with a punk-rock string quartet and free-jazz jams with various musicians. He organizes regular improvisation sessions at Warsaw’s club Jazzgot, where he plays with invited guests.

Viön (a.k.a. Artur Jaworski) is concerned with the inexplicable magic behind sound and explores the relationship between physical phenomena and human perception. He pays attention not only to the final piece, but to the listening experience itself. A major part of his work is aimed at total sound immersion in a location. He says that it is impossible to create this kind of music—it is only possible to notice and discover it. He experiments with space as a processor of sound, often re-recording sounds in different spaces, revealing the unexpected. VIÖN released his debut album flashbacks on Cpt. Sparky in 1999. Later, as an EA member, he appeared on [~.], r, 11.00 and also on compilation releases. With Membrana (Mem) and Jacek Staniszewski he is part of the trio Viön/Membrana/Facial Index, which released the debut CD Tektonika on Polycephal in 2001. Most of his new sounds appear on his web site . Currently Viön is finishing the recording of his 3D album, which will be available as a DVD-Audio.

Fucking Flowers

Sound Cinema

The Sound Cinema is a place for the observation of sounds. It presents stories told without words, images formed by the movement of sound, audio postcards from remote corners of the globe, and imaginative constructs in time and space. Audiences will step out of the hubbub of the congress grounds straight into a unique space, where they will hear paramusical projects and archival radio shows.

Projections will be held in the historic sound engineering studio at the Wrocław Feature Film Studio. The morning program will feature radio dramas for children, while in the afternoon audiences will hear multi-channel pieces, field recordings from all over the world, masterpieces of musique concrete, radio dramas, electronic and electroacoustic compositions, both new and archival – ones that delimit the boundaries of music itself and ones that define its very essence.

The Inner Ear Massage Parlour

The Inner Ear Massage Parlour is a charlatan’s project, mixing truth with fiction, the absurd and grotesque but treating things in a professional and serious manner. With reference to traditional shamans and the barber surgeons of medieval Europe we can find the very deep connections between medicine and music – healing through listening (sound). Our work is different from that of the conventional approach of music therapists, but we remain open to the inspiration and knowledge that comes from this trade. As charlatans we are absolved and free from convention, but as good-hearted people we have the best intentions towards what we do. In accordance with the science and wisdom of professor Ripplemark we play and heal, equally others as ourselves.

Links

ZPD

Products of ZPD are one- and multi-layer intentional objects, existentially grounded in music scores and standard audio media. Our client gets a phonographical picture of a performed piece of music, stored on a compact disk.

Each of our manufactured articles is a schematical entity, worked out in the way to get its full characteristic peculiarity only during the process of individual perception. Artistic properties consisting the core of a product, merged with construction elements, partially determine the final shape of an aesthetical object that appears in a listener’s consciousness. The ultimate completement of that shape is performed by listener’s imagination, activated by the core properties (given directly in perception). That is a tested and never-failing technical solution, based on a well described process of concretization (R.Ingarden, M.Merleau-Ponty, H.G.Gadamer). It utilizes even unconscious psychical processes and fails only in the case of heavy break-down of the listener’s central nervous system.

Thanks to the application of a substantiation process in the final product forming (what has been unheard-of in the industry till now), the object of listener’s contemplation is partially constructed by himself. Our client has always an opportunity to shape the product accordingly to his own preferences, to take it and to read it in many different ways. That is why each contact with a ready ZPD’s product is an individual and interactive aesthetical experience.

ZPD products exist timelessly. As pure intentional objects they do not undergo corrosion, degradation and are invulnerable to any chemical or physical agents. The only condition of their existence’s continuity is at least one ‘existential basis’ like: musical score, sound recording information – and the existence of correct interpretation (‘reconstruction’) methods of those kinds of information.

Links

SzaZa

SzaZa’s (Paweł Szamburski / Patryk Zakrocki duo) music is a unique blending of seemingly opposite extremes ? of noise and silence, pop and contemporary chamber, beauty and ugliness, of sophisticated wisdom and pure, naive thoughtlessness. Using clarinets, violin, analogue loopstations,
subtle effects and interaction with the audience, the musicians seek to collapse those oppositions, attempting to free both the stage and the audience from the bonds of rules and cultural expectations.

Patryk Zakrocki and Paweł Szamburski are multi-instrumentalists, improvisers and promoters of culture who have been active on the Warsaw improvised music and independent art scene since 1999. Szamburski and Zakrocki create music for theatre, film, silent movies and contemporary dance. They
are members of the Warsaw-based independent music label Lado ABC and the Lado cultural association, whose activity over the last ten years has contributed a great deal to the dynamic development of new music in Poland.

Credit line: [Venue, eg. The Brooklyn Academy of Music/Cinefamily/SFFS etc] and the Polish Cultural Institute in New York in association with Unsound

Links

Normal Bias

The Normal Bias has begun its time of infancy by four films, thematically related to its original name: Black Taxi. The films showed a story of a black taxi that drove off with friend’s clarinets during one night. Particular elements of that series are connected with one, hidden word.

The next project of the group is, caused by child-like curiosity, a desire to explore nature as a realm of sound. ‘Nature Study’ is a series of experiments with live processing of sounds of nature and an use of the landscape as an opportunity for an acoustic wave deformation. This will be a period of gathering knowledge and material.

Normal Bias, enriched by gains of fruitful childhood, will finally mature into performing of electronic and electroacoustic music classic pieces. The rendition of four Variations by John Cage will mark the beginning of the stage. It will be another series, realised in parallel, called ‘Envelope Bastards’.